


the edge of mystery, surrounded by it

by verilix



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: (well sort of), Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26163646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verilix/pseuds/verilix
Summary: A scientist came up with an algorithm, and sent it to the past.These are her last thoughts.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	the edge of mystery, surrounded by it

**Author's Note:**

> This is total navel gazing nonsense. But - who was the scientist that created the algorithm? We know she killed herself to stop it being taken, but if it was the last hope of humanity why didn't she take the last step and activate it?
> 
> These are my thoughts. Thank you for reading.
> 
> Title comes from a quote from Oppenheimer: "Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it."

The Kaffi was barely lukewarm as it seeped out of the machine in fits and spurts, greyer than the warm brown of the adverts. She was too young to remember coffee proper, the stuff that came from trees; she was barely old enough to remember when the shop had more than one brand of the synthetic stuff, before the parent company of the Kaffi brand seized the monopoly and shoved Frisch products out of the beverage game for good.

It was surprising how mundane the end of the world was, but it had been a spectre on the horizon for most of her life. Humans adapted - even to the prospect of extinction, apparently.

She still had to eat and drink and deal with the consequences of both. She still had to sleep, when she could. When her job let her. When her conscience allowed. The problem was...

The problem was there were no guarantees. At all. Practical testing had reached its limits and theory alone insisted that the algorithm would work, but the algorithm working was no indication that the plan would work.

The Final Plan.

Inverting time for small objects – a pen, a beaker, a bullet - was simple once the initial understanding of the theory involved was complete. Inverting time for biological organisms – from flowers, to bugs, and eventually to humans – was more complex, assuming you wished for them to survive the irradiation process. Inverting the Earth? That required a mind that wasn't just one in a generation.

It required someone who could hold concepts more massive than humanity in their head without flinching away from the existential horror of the void of the unknown, who felt awe instead. Who felt curiosity as powerful as the gravity of a black hole. Someone like her. She had no peers apart from the long dead, which had hurt once. It was a gift, now.

But her genius meant there were questions niggling away in her brain. The curse of her genius was that she always had so, so many questions eating away at her, curiosity scratching at the door between what was safe and what was not. They focused her obsession for knowledge.

Questions like:

What happens if we invert the entropic cycle of the earth?

Her research had been funded by sponsors who wanted her to find out the answer to the “how”. The “what happens” was something she was on the verge of succeeding in answering, with the final step being the activation of the algorithm she had devised.

What happens if, when, the past is undone?

She didn't know. Not yet.

But. _But_.

Can you change the past?

The answer so far seemed to be a resounding no. The technology was still too young to do a literal test of the Grandfather Paradox, but attempts to undo the thread of cause and effect had all proven unsuccessful so far. Of course, the alternative was that it was impossible to record success or failure due to the theoretical existence of multiple universes, which is what the next plan had relied upon.

Another plan meant another question.

How far back can a person go? The answer: as far as they can live. Pointless.

The turning point in the Earth's continued viability was over a thousand years ago, as far as the biologists and geologists and evolutionary anthropologists and god knows who else had calculated. The oldest human being had barely reached one hundred and eighty, and at least twenty years of any lifetime would be spent training the first generation to survive inverted life.

The plan to send people back and infiltrate the past so better choices could be made to save the climate died like the first person who volunteered – “ _volunteered_ ” – to test whether aging continued while inverted.

So the next question, the Final Plan.

Is it possible to reverse the Earth's entropic cycle? Theory says yes.

Therefore, is it possible to reverse the state of the Earth's climate to the point where human life could survive? Theory again says yes.

So what happens to the people of the past?

Theory says... run the algorithm and find out.

Except. Except...

 _Theory_ _doesn't_ _say that._

Theory and practice, based on the evidence produced through rigorous and focused experimentation, both state that in the event of identical particles meeting in an inverted and noninverted state respectively annihilation will ensue. Plus and minus equal null.

Theory proposes that in the event of a Grandfather Paradox being successful, the dominant timeline with the change will overwrite the previous events. The past as currently experienced would cease to exist.

The **sponsors** are the ones who claim the only way forward is to do it.

“But”. “Except”. There are always other questions, aren’t there?

Like:

How many people are alive today?

The sponsors say merely tens of thousands. The sponsors also say Europe is a wasteland, that the coastlines everywhere drowned and Africa and Australia burned. That the survivors, those lucky few, exist in subterranean complexes expanded from bunkers owned by the sponsors, who sell the food and rent the homes and pay the scientists for their research.

The sponsors, she has realised, may possibly be full of shit.

She never asked - _research for who_? She only ever focused on the pure scientific research; perhaps her curiosity was not as all-consuming as her ego had supposed.

Months ago she realised that she didn't know enough to be sure that what she had made was a shining light illuminating the future of humanity, and not a weapon to eradicate, if the population records were correct, billions of humans of the past.

Natural air cannot be breathed by inverted lungs, and vice versa. Inverting the Earth would invert what was in existence at a fixed moment in time at the point the algorithm was run, so the current population, not the population of the past. Mass suffocation would ensue as time marched slowly backwards. Maybe.

Then, at a prearranged point in time the inversion would be undone and time would progress once more, the climate restored with the population of the future inhabiting the Earth of the past. Possibly.

The human species would be saved. Apparently.

The agents sent to her from the world outside the complex had seemed fairly convincing when they told her they were from something called "Tenet", and that there were more people alive than she and the rest of the population of the complexes had been told. That they had been waiting for her for a very long time.

Perhaps they were liars, too.

She made her way to the testing labs; one had a door between the two halves of the containment chamber, a relic of the tests exploring the effects of inversion on the lungs and digestive systems.

Her Kaffi was cold by now.

Carrying the mug in her left hand, and her ID pass in her right, she swiped the pass and smiled at the guard by the reader. She didn't know him, he was new.

She was glad. One of the others would have noticed something odd; she was a poor actress.

Typical methods of suicide could be prevented using her technology. And the sponsors would prevent her suicide, she knew. Paranoia had dogged her for years; she was familiar with the betrayals of academia and stolen ideas, and so she had kept the workings behind the algorithm secret, private. Once she was no longer alive to lead the way, lesser minds would fail to find the path to the algorithm and the threat would no longer exist outside the physical puzzle she had created, inverted, and had Tenet scatter across the globe she'd never explore herself.

Unless she's less unique than she thought. Still, she could buy time.

Ironically.

She initiated the laboratory door seal behind her as per standard operating procedure, choked down the Kaffi she'd only really brought as a prop, and waited until she saw herself on the other side.

Her other self waved through the glass.

She stripped off her gloves as she opened the door parting her present from her future.

Her obsession had lead to the creation of a world annihilating device, regardless of whether it destroyed the world of the past or of the future. She alone held it in her mind.

Therefore, her mind had to be destroyed, irrevocably.

Up close she could see the stain of what she guessed was Nutri-Egg from breakfast, or possibly a Füd product from the day before, on the lapel of her future self's cardigan. She could see a bit she'd missed shaving just behind her ear. Her lips were turned up involuntarily as the tears gathered in her eyes, and there was a small part of her that was instinctively, screamingly afraid.

She reached out to herself, scared and so very sure.

She didn't want to die.

But it was alright.

It was alright.

The future self she'd never be was shaking slightly, but smiling.

She embraced herself and was embraced, cheek touching bare cheek.

And as her body detonated in atomic annihilation, it didn't hurt for very long at all.


End file.
